November 15, 2009

Today I wanted to watch the latest Motorola Droid review video, stuff that I got on twitter marked with #android hash tag. However on the very beginning of video I noticed very effective Yahoo! commercial … it’s something about YOU!

Since I recently became HTC Hero owner and watched plenty of their stuff, immediately got “Deja Vu” effect. It didn’t take me long to find this page, which represent the latest HTC ad campaing.

Although it is great to know that both Yahoo and HTC are following recent trends so they threat YOU (us) as important guys, I really wonder how come they come up with almost the same message and logo at the same time? Please let us know who was stealing from whom?

November 10, 2009

Recently I got brand new HTC Hero – great android based phone. Since my previous phone (Nokia N73) has been working with Mac without any problem I was very disappointed to figure out that I have to deal with Windows for syncing my phone with computer and firmware upgrades.
After I upgraded it to latest official 2.73.405.4 ROM, I used Google Contacts/Calendar apps to sync my previous Nokia 73 stuff with Google and Hero, so having laptopmobile connection to Internet (tethering) really sounded like something possible to achieve. A friend of mine with HTC Magic told me about way to connect to Internet with Wifi Tether application, which works on root-ed devices only. So after I passed trough complete rooting procedure explained here and here, I gained root access but still wasn’t able to make Wifi Tether work with Mac. Hero was visible as another AP, and even thought Mac was actually able to connect to it, I never got “outside” access to the Internet and eventually gave up. I found some threads that modaco custom ROM might be solution but figured that for newbie in android world like me, chances to brick brand new device while doing unsupported ROM upgrade are not so low so eventually I gave up.

Unlike for wifi tethering, USB tether for Hero and Windows comes “Out of the Box” (all you have to do is to turn on mobile sharing) but unfortunately it doesn’t work with a Mac. When you connect Hero to Mac, instead of new network device Mac see it as modem, but if you try to dial (like with *99#) you obviously get an error.
After I spent several hours reading endless discussions on various forums, today I finally managed to connect my MacBook Pro on the Internet with my HTC Hero mobile Internet (EDGE/GPRS/3G/HSDPA) connection.

Before I delve into instructions, please bear in mind that although this tutorial is based on HTC Hero and Mac running on latest (10.6.1) Snow Leopard, as far as I can tell it should be working with any other Android device or older version of Mac. I assume that you have MacPorts installed and that you are able to connect to Internet with your Mobile Phone.

Prepare your phone
————————–
You are going to install azilink on your phone. Since all tether applications are removed from Android Market, you have to download it directly from site. But before you do that, you have to make sure that installing applications from unknown sources is allowed. So Press Home, then Menu->Settings->Applications and make sure that “Unknown Sources” is checked. Also in Development menu make sure that “USB Debugging” is checked.

Step2: Android SDK
Download Android SDK (http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html) for Mac and unpack it somewhere on your machine. I used my $HOME dir (/Users/dinke) so I unpacked whole folder and named it android-sdk so full path is /Users/dinke/android-sdk. Since you are going to call tools from that folder, we have to put it into our $PATH variable by editing $HOME/.bash_profile file. I assume that you don’t have UNIX experience so this is step by step guide :

1) Open Terminal Applications
2) Type:

cd

and hit enter
3) You are now in your home dir (ie. /Users/dinke). Now you are going to edit .bash_profile file with pico editor :
Type:

pico .bash_profile

4) Add this line to last line of file:
export PATH=/Users/dinke/android-sdk/tools:$PATH
(replace /Users/dinke/android-sdk/tools with actuall path on your system)
5) Hit ctrl-x then answer Y and hit enter

Now you should be ready to call android tools (like we are going to do later) without specifying full system path.

Step3: OpenVPN2 App

Download and install openVPN2 . We will use MacPort’s port command for doing that. So again open terminal application and type:

sudo port install openvpn2

Now application will be automatically downloaded and compiled. This will take a while, and if this end without any error message you are good to go further :)

Step 4: azilink.ovpn file

1) Download http://azilink.googlecode.com/files/azilink.ovpn file
2) Create folder openvpn in $HOME/library folder (so you have new folder in for example /Users/dinke/Library/openvpn
3) Edit file azilink.ovpn and comment out line 8 with TCP_NODELAY (so it may looks like this):

1) Download script from http://pastie.org/405289 (there is download link on top right) and save it somewhere on your system. I assume you saved it under our home dir as modem.sh (/Users/dinke/modem.sh)
2) Give that script executable privileges. So open terminal application and type this:
chmod 777 /Users/dinke/modem.sh
(change path and script name according to your system)

Now we are almost done and we are ready to test actual connection. So connect your phone with Mac with USB cable, open terminal app and type this:

If you get error (like command not found) check path setting for android sdk tools. If your device is not listed check that it is connected properly. If everything looks ok (you get device id listed) then we can connect our phone to Internet and run actual connection script. Make sure that your phone is connected to Mobile Internet (go to Menu->Settings->Wireless Controll and check Mobile Network checkbox), and then assuming that you’ve saved modem script under /Users/dinke/modem.sh you can run it by typing absolute path in terminal:

If you get some errors make sure that you’ve passed correctly trough all needed steps. If no errors found, it is good time to test your new internet connection. You can do so by trying to ping some site or simple opening browser and visiting some Web Site. It should be working just fine!